Too many reputations... or... beating another dead horse by Rylana

rylanadionysis

So I took an extended break from STO to play another title for a couple years. When I left I had managed to rep up 10 characters and alts in the five reps of the time (up to and including Counter Command). Effectively maxed out, but I digress.

I left around the time Delta Rising launched, I know a sixth rep was added then, but I remember back in 2012 or so that they wanted to streamline the number of currencies that existed in the game. There was already a lot of pushback because of how many reps were added in the year immediately following Legacy of Romulus (3 in 12 months) and we were told it would let up. But clearly it has not.

Fast forward to 2018 and we have... 11 reps now? 12? Its pretty sick honestly. Ive only managed in four months to have the time to rep up one character, my main, and the rest are in varying stages of 2-3 of the reps even being out of tier 1. Its just not alt friendly at all.

Perhaps the time has come to consolidate reputation marks into one catch-all type that every rep draws from. Considering the most run content now are the red alerts and a few ground that seem to pop all the time, there are quite a few maps that never ever pop, especially in older reputations.

I for one find it immeasurably hard to grind up terran marks since counterpoint rarely ever pops, nor does terak nor. I can get some terrans by doing my daily box in the red alert, but thats just a cheap quickie for not much return at all. Cant even really repeat it since every run after the first is like 15 marks.

Consolidate all marks into one currency called Reputation Marks, let them be used for all reps equally, and lets slim down the amount of grind through the rep system. It was time to do this three years ago, its definitely past due now.

At the very least add a way to convert marks. I have on some characters 5000+ Omegas and Nukaras that are only really useful now for more unrefined dilithium i really dont need. Let me convert those to Terrans or Lukaris or something, hell even make it a 2-1 conversion, and that would be fine too. Make it a rep project.

anodynes

Clearly it has let up. When you left, there were 5 reputations that had been introduced in just over 17 months. From then, there have been 6 reputations introduced over approximately 3 years, with no new one introduced in almost a year now. I would call slightly more than doubling the reps in a bit over twice the time a drastic slowdown, and note that they've stabilized at an average of 2 per year. There's nothing "sick" about giving people direction to play new things for a little while every 6 months on average, it means that the game is still growing, and that there is new gear with new bonuses to allow for new ways to experience the game that often. The game kept going while you were gone. You are now faced with the choice of catching up with all of that on every character, or just doing the parts that you want to do on the characters that you want to do them on.

You can get more than enough marks for 2 days worth of progress in any reputation that you want in under 5 minutes of playtime with the daily box, and all but Competitive have a variety of ways to get them aside from Red Alerts that can even be done alone in around 5 minutes. For the 6 that you are missing, there are patrols in the Delta Quadrant or open missions on Kobali Prime for Delta marks. The last 2 of those missions, which you can trigger and finish alone by picking up the story missions that trigger them, also give an Ancient Power Cell each, and can be used as a solo option for Iconian Marks and Datacores as well. Doing both of these open missions shouldn't take you 15 minutes total. Terran and and Temporal Marks can be earned at your leisure in the Badlands Battlezone, and again should not take you very much longer than 5 minutes per area. The elite marks, however, will take more than just you doing the zone. Lukari marks can be earned in the Tzenkethi Battlezone, but I wouldn't count on being able to earn the elite marks there because that requires getting to the end stage of the zone, and it's too difficult to do unless the zone is full of people who really know what they're doing.

Adding a universal reputation mark or making them convertible at even 1 mark of choice for 2 surplus marks would just further kill the unused queues. Choice of marks from Red Alerts has already dealt a severe blow to them, let's not ask for everything but the 4 most-run queues to finally be killed off completely.